How do you rehabilitate a spawn of Satan?

Spawn of Satan!  WoWStalin was a seminarian before he became a bank robber, bolshevik  bureaucrat and Red Tsar.  Ithink you are going to have a problem showing that he was related to Lucifer who, according to Milton's version, was a far far better creature than our former good friend--Uncle Joe.

So he's a hero of yours I take it?

Now that was unfair--foul!Stalin was one of the most amoral wretches that I ever read about.  He was loutish, crude and totallywithout compassion for anyone.Yet--he is revered by many Russians because he saved them from the fascists--he really did. 

He did?   ???  I have always thought it was Zhukov and Koniev that saved them from the Fascists.  Stalin was a figurehead for most of WWII and was actually not very involved in planning military operations.  He used Beria and the NKVD to ensure that production norms were met and to stifle internal descent.  lastly, his pre-war purges vastly overshadow any wartime accomplishments.  he was responsible for the death of more people than Hitler was and the ones Stalin killed were Soviet citizens.

He did not pick the Generals.  He instituted a Social Darwinism of sorts by executing those that failed.  It was simple, succeed and prosper or fail and either be killed by the enemy or your own side.  He was the ultimate source of authority, yes but he did not direct military policy.  Unlike Hitler he understood he was not a military genius and so let his generals plan campaigns he merely set them goals.  They could achieve them or suffer the consequences.  Leadership through fear of reprisal is not leadership, it is tyranny.Yes, I have read the Gulag Archipelago, ad I don't think anyone in America today is seriously suggesting we do something similar.  Yes, everyone had to work, but then the alternative was starve or go to the camps.  If Stalin was so great why were the Nazi's initially greeted as liberators?  It was only when the people realized that the Nazis were more brutal than the Bolsheviks that they began to wholeheartedly support Stalin. I is also significant that Stalin revved the Orthodox Church and re emphasized traditional Russian(not Soviet Russian) patriotic themes to garner support during the war, even though all these things had been ruthlessly suppressed prior to the war.  He even had to bring the Patriarch of Moscow out of a camp when he reestablished the Orthodox Church and allowed it's free worship again.  He even put chaplains back into the Red Army.  He was cunning yes, but it was the cunning of a loan shark not the greatness of an inspiring leader.His pre-war purges have a direct relation to the horrendous losses the Russians suffered in the opening campaign.

He did not pick the Generals.  He instituted a Social Darwinism of sorts by executing those that failed.  It was simple, succeed and prosper or fail and either be killed by the enemy or your own side.  He was the ultimate source of authority, yes but he did not direct military policy.  Unlike Hitler he understood he was not a military genius and so let his generals plan campaigns he merely set them goals.  They could achieve them or suffer the consequences.  Leadership through fear of reprisal is not leadership, it is tyranny.Yes, I have read the Gulag Archipelago, ad I don't think anyone in America today is seriously suggesting we do something similar.  Yes, everyone had to work, but then the alternative was starve or go to the camps.  If Stalin was so great why were the Nazi's initially greeted as liberators?  It was only when the people realized that the Nazis were more brutal than the Bolsheviks that they began to wholeheartedly support Stalin. I is also significant that Stalin revved the Orthodox Church and re emphasized traditional Russian(not Soviet Russian) patriotic themes to garner support during the war, even though all these things had been ruthlessly suppressed prior to the war.  He even had to bring the Patriarch of Moscow out of a camp when he reestablished the Orthodox Church and allowed it's free worship again.  He even put chaplains back into the Red Army.  He was cunning yes, but it was the cunning of a loan shark not the greatness of an inspiring leader.His pre-war purges have a direct relation to the horrendous losses the Russians suffered in the opening campaign.Semantics:  He picked the ones that won and not all officers  that failed to live up to his expectations were executed--just a lot.  As the ultimate source of authority---he was the leader and it makes no difference at all whether he won through fear and intimidation or through inspired leadership.  In bothWorld Wars the powers hired and fired Generals looking for winners.  In the armed forces all leadership is tyrannical.  Do you imagine men would vote to hurl themselves into machine gun fire?  While workingin Boston in the 1970's I had a supervisor who was a Marine captain in the Pacific War.  He told me thatamong other duties the "gunny" had the task of making sure the grunts left their holes and moved forward when the officer led the group.  Failure to do so brought  severe negative consequences.I hope that you are correct about nobody in America wanting to set up camps.  How about some for illegal aliens or those suspected of criminal acts such as terrorism?  To refer to Wally's comment--it would get the lazy ones off the street and their labor could not only defray the cost of their detention, but help pay down the national debt.The people who welcomed the German troops were ignorant of the true aims of Hitler--so were many others.  Of course you would support someone who was going to merely to exploit you (Stalin) thansomeone who was going to work you to death, kill you or render you into soap and mattress stuffing.As we agreed--Stalin was cunning--the Conflict was called the Great Patriotic War and "Mother Russia"not Communism are just a few examples of this.  So--in the end I disagree with you.  If anybody but Stalin (horrid creature that he was and no shrine to him exists in my house) had been in charge, there isa very very good chance, according to all I have read, that the Soviet system would have been oustedand German troops would sit on the top of the Urals.  Just in case Homeland Security searches my home--I do have a bottle of Vodka from Georgia (the European one) which bears the picture of the" greatleader.  We had training sessions in the former Soviet republics and a friend brought it back for me.  I am staring at it as I type.  His visage is on the label in full military uniform.  I was told that it is verypopular there, but as he was Georgian there is some excuse.One final point.  The Russian losses in the fall of 1941 were horrible, but in the end did not count for much.  With almost infinite space and almost limitless manpower resources the defeat of Russia would have been hard.  With aid from the allies and lots and lots of Studebaker trucks it got very hard.  In fact,due to heroic efforts on the part of the Russian people and sacrifices of soldiers it became imposible.Stalin reaped the rewards.  The quarterback gets to have access to the cheer leader pool; it is theDarwinian way. There is no doubt that he was the quarterback as much as we hate to admit it.

Interesting discussion.A couple of thoughts...Given the titanic disaster that was the Soviet Army for most of 1941 under Barbarossa's advance, Stalin really didn't make a (positive) difference until Moscow was under direct threat.  Having confirmed through his spy network that Japan was eyeing war with the Western Powers in late 1941 he was able to shift Siberian and far Eastern troops to the Moscow front - we all know how that story went.  I contend that this is the point where Stalin started to make a positive difference in the war effort.  Yes, he - or his office - had arranged for the evacuation of the essential factories to the east, away from the Germans, but it was, in my opinion, the battle of Moscow where Staling not only gained confidence as a wartime leader, it is also where he started the process of not trying to run the war as a general, and instead started giving more autonomy to his generals.  It wasn't an "all at once" thing, but progressed throughout the course of the war (just the opposite of Hitler who tried took a more active role as a strategist as the war progressed).Having read a fair amount about the war on the Eastern Front, and a fair number of memoirs, many Red Army soldiers fought as much out of fear of Stalin and his regime as they did out of hatred of the Nazis.I recently studied Kruschev's "Secret Speech" to the 20th Soviet Congress - the one where he denounced Stalin and laid the groundwork for "de-Stalinization" of the Soviet Union.  I was fascinated to learn how Kruschev had moved from being one of Stalin's henchmen during the war to demonizing him later.  One of the things that struck me in my studies was the varying feelings about Stalin in Russia in "current" times (since the end of the Cold War).  Some who were intereviewed saw him as a monster, while others viewed him with nostalgia.No doubt he was a monster, and every bit as evil as Hitler - but maybe he was precisely the type of leader that was necessary to ultimately and completely defeat Nazism at the time.

I wholeheartedly agree here.  Stalin also was smart enough to relax his censorship of religious expression during the dark days of the war giving the Russian people something more to rally around.  The Church, in gratitude, chipped in an enormous amount of patriotic propaganda to spur the people on in the what they considered The Great Patriotic War.  Stalin was shrewd enough to know he wasn't a military leader, but he did understand how to manipulate the masses through propaganda....which might have been his greatest strategy overall.  Zhukov did the rest.

Staying on topic.  If Stalin had not purged the military in the late 30's there is every possibility that the Russians would have been able to stop the Germans before they got in sight of the Kremlin.  The Russians suffered something like 3-4 million casualties in the opening months of the war and lost 2 armies and 747,850 men in the first two weeks of the invasion alone.1  There were instances in the opening months of the invasion when the Russians plucked former officers out of the Gulag and put them back in command.  it is not semantics to argue that Stalin was not a great leader.  My earlier statement that leadership is about inspiration is still relevant.  Napoleon was a great leader, he inspired those under his command to achieve the mission.  Stalin inspired nothing other than fear, succeed or be shot does not lead one to trust the commander.  It makes people hopeless.  There is a reason why Russian casualties were so much higher than German, even in the final days of the war.  It was because the Russians ruled through intimidation while the Germans fought under leaders.  (Notice I do not make any claims about the rightness of the German cause but about the quality of German military leadership).  Lastly, it should teel you something about leadership that most western militaries are modeled along Prussian lines, I cannot think of any militarily successful country other than Russia itself that follows the Russian organizational model, which is incidentally modelled on Prussian methods of the early 19th century.From everything I have read for the past forty years the German Army in the first and second world wars was the best in the world in terms of leadership especially among the non-coms who weretrained to deviate from instructions if the situation changed, which it usually did.  Their moral, equipment and combat skills were well known especially those who had faced them in battle. Their organizationalmethods line/staff etc. have a ghostly parallel--most western bureaucracies in the civilian sector are based upon the same principles warped to fit the particulars of the agency.The Russians were not the best, but they had the advantage of numbers and in WWII the knowledge thatif they attacked they might be killed, but if they refused they would be killed.Stalin's purge just prior to the war was certainly not good for the Russian army, but it is conjecture to say that had it not occurred the blitz would have been stopped.  Given Stalin's slavish adherence tothe provisions of the pact and his refusal to listen to his intelligence section made the German breakthrough surprise almost a given.As I am at a loss to speak to you of Stalin's leadership as your opinion seems to be adamantine.  Letme try another approach.  I know nothing about football, but I know a lot about motivating people.  Letme combine the two.  From the perspective of the team owner, a great coach (leader) is one who wins games and fills the coffers with cash.  I imagine that it matters little to the owner whether the coachuses love or fear or anything in between to achieve his goal of victory.  Motivation is an art that canuse fine tools or crude ones and the choice depends a lot on the particular task involved.  Flattery,money, perks and fear of immediate execution are all arrows in a supervisors quiver, at least in theory.Stalin's methods worked and we need not concern ourselves as to the morality or the finesse of thetechnique.  War is not only hell--it is amoral.  Stalin's crude warriors with their crudely made weapons(the welding showed and the finish was inferior on guns and tanks) won the war on the eastern front.You may loath his leadership and disparage his skills, but he called the shots, picked the Generals andstiffened the resolve of the people and not only through fear. Granted that one can be a great leader on the loosing side, Lee, Rommel, Ludendorff et. al., but most historians I have read agree that Stalin wasa key figure in the success of Russian arms in the Great Patriotic War.  I'm with them.